Wednesday Morning News

Apple’s Online Store now has iPhone and iPad cases they’ve said have been “tested to the limit“. The new page says all third-party accessories have undergone a series of test before being sold on the Apple Online Store, pointing out the design, camera, acoustics, sensors, cellular, and wireless as areas which are specifically tested before any third-party accessories are sold.

After the removal of Home Sharing in iOS 8.4, Apple’s Eddy Cue has since confirmed on Twitter that they’re working to bring Home Sharing back by the time iOS 9 has been released to the public. I’m adding this one to the list of features iOS 9 will bring, which currently includes a 100,000 song limit for iTunes Match — but seriously, it’s good that Apple now appears to be taking this feedback and acting on it.

New data shows Apple Watch demand has slowly dwindled after a strong launch period. While the data says Apple is currently selling around 5,000 Apple Watch units per day in the US, MacRumors admits the data doesn’t include sales from outside of the US, where the Watch is also available in Canada, Australia, the UK, or the twelve other countries where Apple Watch is now available.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been named as a member of Duke University’s Board of Trustees, where his six-year term will be spent assisting the governing body in “determining Duke University’s educational mission and fiscal policies”.

A close up of the OLED pixels on the Apple Watch reveals a much different pattern to the typical LCD array of blue, green, and red sub-pixels. Putting the Watch display under a microscope also lets us take a look at the touch-sensitive element that powers Force Touch, which shows up as a series of orange dots arranged in a pattern.

The first swim-tracking app for the Apple Watch proves that the device is surprisingly resistant to water, and that the display is incredibly readable underwater. Their prototype app can even add the captured data to Health, contributing to your activity rings if you’re looking to get a perfect month.

If you have Spotify playlists that need to be moved over to Apple Music, Stamp is a three-step process that makes that easy: export your Spotify playlists, import them using Stamp, and then the app does all the hard work of putting them into Apple Music-compatible formats.

The Sweet Setup says there are many read later services out there, but the original is still the best. Instapaper has gone from strength to strength since it left Marco Arment’s hands, and even if you don’t care for the new audio features, there’s still plenty of other enhancements to make your portable reading experience all the better.

Ben Bajarin went without the Apple Watch for a week, and wondered how he ever lived without it. Maybe not those words exactly, but the convenience of having notifications on something other than your phone is pretty hard to turn down, once you’ve gotten used to them.

If you have Spotify playlists that need to be moved over to Apple Music, Stamp is a three-step process that makes that easy: export your Spotify playlists, import them using Stamp, and then the app does all the hard work of putting them into Apple Music-compatible formats.

I really want to try this but the fact that it adds each song to my music library when creating a playlist really turns me off the whole idea.